FTSE 100 directors fail security test, says IT group NCC

If you were the director of a FTSE 100 company and someone sent you a dongle through the post, would you immediately plug it into your computer and open it?

Of course not, you say. Security risks and all that. But IT testing company NCC sent out dongles to FTSE 100 directors as a security experiment, and found that 60% of them were opened. As the company said on a visit organised by broker Peel Hunt, they could easily have been infected with malicious software.

According to Peel Hunt analysts Alex Jarvis and Paul Morland, the increasing use of wireless, tablets, smartphones and the associated apps, represents a big opportunity for NCC. The WikiLeaks revelations and the associated internet attacks are also good publicity for the company, they say. In a buy note they added:

NCC see this market as an arms race between hackers and IT professionals. It is not a battle they think about winning, but as the fight escalates, the potential for their solutions increases.

The company is also on the lookout for acquisitions, especially for its assurance division, with two US and one UK company on the list of possible takeovers. It recently bought US group iSec Partners for £14.4m, adding a number of Silicon Valley companies to its customer list.